MP 1,1-5,1 The future of gaming on cMP’s due to lacking AVX

[Project Alice]

Excuse me for the somewhat clickbait title, but I feel like this could be useful for people googling about this type of thing in the future.

I almost posted this in Early Intel Macs, but they have a rule putting all the cMP’s over here anyway.

So, my 5,1 is the most powerful computer I own, unless you count the M1 iPad Pro. It has always allowed me to play any game I want, at decent frame rates and good quality. I know from all my time lurking on here and on other forums like Steam and Reddit, that I’m not entirely alone in that respect.

I feel like this thread should serve as what games have the potential of working, and which ones don’t. Our old Xeons, especially if we have two of them are more than powerful enough to handle the most modern AAA games. But lately there has been in unfortunate trend of devs compiling games using the AVX/AVX2 instruction set. Starfield is the latest offender, and I have spent a lot of time searching and trying to get it to work. AVX code apparently is in around 50% of the game, so a patch appears to be out of the question. Cyberpunk 2077 was one that initially wouldn’t work without AVX, but ended up bring patched out. First by a mod, and then an official patch.

This seems to be a trend that I unfortunately don’t forsee stopping anytime soon, because “you should have upgraded by now”. But many of us don’t have that mindset.

I am hoping to play Star Wars outlaws. I have yet to see anything about AVX being used in that game, but it just came out a couple months ago. I haven’t seen anything posts yet. If nobody else knows, I’ll probably be the first to try.

Games that I know work include:
Hogwarts Legacy
Cyberpunk 2077
All the Tomb Raider’s
All the Resident Evil’s
All the Forza Horizon series’
Fallout 4
Fallout 76
All the halo’s (including master chief edition)

And as of right now the only one that I know is out of the question is, Starfield

I hope others will add to this, the more knowledge the better. Might save some people a headache knowing before they buy a game. And I couldn’t find another thread specifically about Mac Pro gaming that wasn’t about a GPU recommendation, so I hope this thread can be a place to also talk about your experiences in trying to game on your old Mac Pro.

 

[alecpizz]

I've found that a lot of modern UE5 games require AVX/AVX2 out of the box, with no real way to circumvent it.

Specifically I tried:
Until Dawn Remake
Silent Hill 2

Both crash with Illegal Instruction errors.

 

[Project Alice]

I've found that a lot of modern UE5 games require AVX/AVX2 out of the box, with no real way to circumvent it.

Specifically I tried:
Until Dawn Remake
Silent Hill 2

Both crash with Illegal Instruction errors.

That’s interesting, I know I read UE5 doesn’t require it. I wonder if it’s a default setting that none of the devs bothered to change with those games.

 

[AlexMaximus]

As an MP5.1 enthusiast, this is my only desktop I have. It‘s also heavily used as my Steam Games station for almost a decade now. I have collected hundreds of games. Out of those, I have purchased one game only that can’t be run on this MP5.1 because of AVX2, - which is Death Stranding.
Be careful, Death Stranding will not work on Steam in Win10 on your Mac Pro 5. Other than that, the 5.1 is still a perfect gaming rig for 95% of all Steam Games, if you did those hardware upgrades overbthe years, such as a faster GPU and NVME SSDs and such.

 

[alecpizz]

That’s interesting, I know I read UE5 doesn’t require it. I wonder if it’s a default setting that none of the devs bothered to change with those games.

I have been informed that there has been community-made patches for both Silent Hill 2 & Until Dawn to get these games running on non-AVX compatible chips. I haven't tried myself but I'd be curious to see how my X5680 & RX6600 handle these games.

 

[Mactech20]

I feel your pain. I really wanted to play Age of Empires IV but it requires AVX2